


Senseless

by Cards_Slash



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-06
Updated: 2016-04-06
Packaged: 2018-05-31 17:38:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6480157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Malik wakes up in the hospital after surviving a violent attack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Senseless

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: AltMal. It's an end of the line (maybe even world), no-hope of survival left sort of deal. They're prepared to die together and, hey, at least they're not alone. Except when one of them wakes up after, he's somehow miraculously survived and that's grand...except only one of them made it.

It came in waves: first the sound of it. The steady hum of electronics that bracketed him on all sides. The slow rise and sudden fall of the machine that pushed air into his lungs. The chatter at the nurses’ station: a confusing mix of real voices and phone calls. Sometimes, in between the cacophony of bells and beeps, he could hear the disheartened crying of relatives visiting loved ones that were dying. 

\--

If he could feel pain, it was a low burn beneath the thick, foggy blanket that kept him still and complacent. It seemed to him, in the brief stretches of near consciousness that he would go mad for the want of freedom. His limbs were laid out so neatly across the bed, held in place by the artfully tucked sheets and the carefully draped blankets. His face was a lax mask, stitched back together and carefully covered with silky gauze. 

\--

The dreams came in the between times, when the overlay of reality was too thick to see through and the syrup that filled his veins was too dense to make the effort to move. The dream was always the same: the smell of freshly cooked meat (maybe lamb) and the roasting smell of slow cooking vegetables. It was something like peppers: a crisp and colorful scent that made the smooth taste of the hummus on his tongue more divine.

The kitchen was small. The conversation of many voices was bleeding through the thin walls from a party next door. There had been suspended laugh, held like a warm coal in the center of his chest that was pink-and-breathy all along Altair’s cheeks. They were exchanging glances over the topics the neighbors were shouting about. 

Altair’s hands were against his body and his face was pressed to his shoulder. His body was shaking as he bit his lips and tried so hard not to laugh-again but it was bursting out of him like a great long howl of sound. Up and up it went, searing through the air.

\--

Malik woke up (like ‘regaining consciousness’) on a Thursday. His nurse was Denise with thick, dark hair that she wore up. Her scrubs were a greenish-blue with infinite pockets and she smiled at him like they had always been friends.

“Where is Altair?” Malik asked when the tube was out of his throat and the thickening-gray-soup that dragged him back into darkness was thin enough he could force the air through his sore throat. “What happened to him?”

Denise smiled at him with no regret, she said, “let’s just concentrate on getting you strong again.”

Malik was gone again, slipping under the tide.

\--

Sometimes there were nightmares, like knives and puddles of red. 

They were nightmares like elbows to the floor and raw-meat-fingertips digging into the scarred linoleum on the kitchen floor.

Nightmares like the red-wet-sound of parting flesh; a sound he attributed to butchers with slabs of meat. Impassive faces and dripping blood as they slide their precision-sharp knives through the flesh of the dead.

They were nightmares, like the cool touch of familiar fingers against his face and the panting promise that had followed him into the dark.

It sounded like, _hold on, Malik. Hold on._

\--

They sent a psychiatrist to talk to him using words like ‘surviving traumatic events’ and ‘violent crimes’. He was half-high on narcotics that puddled in his gut over the dry and tasteless breakfast they’d insisted he eat. The whole of the room was filled with beeps and bops and flashing lights, each of them wired to central command out in the hallway where they let the nurses in their blue-green-scrubs know he was still living.

Malik was listening to the drone of the psychiatrist talking-and-talking while he stared at the flashing heart on the monitor, trying to work out what was _happening_ and when the nightmare would end. He was trying to dig through the cotton stuffing his head to find the thing that worried him and found that he was too pleasantly sedated to care.

But he said, “what happened to Altair?”

And he couldn’t make out what the flattening of the lady psychiatrist’s face even meant. Maybe she was answering him or maybe she wasn’t, but he was closing his eyes and thinking-about-thinking-about—

\--

“Hey,” Altair said with his back against the countertop and a handful of baby carrots keeping his hands busy. He was full of arrogance, as abrasive and intolerable as walking on sharp-edges rocks. “I’m not perfect but even when I’m an asshole; I’m not as bad as that dick.” 

Malik snorted at that. “You have the benefit of preferring yourself to him.”

“So you think I’m worse than that dick?” Altair’s smile was caustic as a chemical; his eyebrows and his body leaning like he could intimidate good favor out of Malik. 

“I think you think very highly of yourself. And I hate that dick the same as you do. That doesn’t mean you’re better; it just means your redeeming qualities are attractive to me.”

\--

Malik started physical therapy on day five, when the narcotics wore off and he was allowed to get out of his bed. Without the drugs filling his body from top to toes, he was a vicious beast, digging through the scattered memories that were floating around the flood of information in his head. 

So it was his hand around the arm of the physical therapist, and his voice like a dragon’s growl (full of _fire_ ) saying, “what happened to Altair?”

“I don’t know who that is,” the woman said to him. She was fair-and-quiet. Her face honest and her arm dimpled from the pressure of his grip. Her skin was pale as white petals, the sort of skin that bruised when mishandled. “If you tell me his name I can look it up for you.” Her eyes were a pale color, between gray and blue and her mouth was drawn into a small frightened pinch. 

Malik nodded and he let her go. His body was singing with odd pains and pulls. There were stitches dissolving in his back, lattice prints over his chest and his legs where he’d been cut (again and again). 

The horror was a bloody-red demon crouching in the dark of his memory, licking its lips and waiting for him.

\--

It was not a nurse and it was not a psychiatrist and it was not a doctor and it was not a physical therapist that told him in the end. News so terrible as that; far worse than the scars that covered his body, that disfigured his face, and slit his throat and beat his arms and scrawled signatures into his thighs. Oh news as terrible as _this_ had to be delivered safely and concisely. 

The hospital staff, in infinite wisdom, had only been holding out until his Mother could be summoned. She had come across the infinite space that separated them; and she sat next to his bedside with her cool fingers over his still-bruised fingers with tears like pearls in her eyes.

“Altair died,” she said. “They couldn’t save him.”

\--

When they were arguing in the theoretical, with Altair lying against his chest and Malik’s body naked and languid after sex, they were linking their fingers together in laziness. Altair said, ‘all violence is senseless. All violence is without reason.’

Malik snorted into his hair at the naivety of it. “Violence is proof we are animals but it’s not senseless. You are not violent without choice—things do not happen without reason. If sense and reason exist in our world in any measure then there is no senseless violence.”

“Chaos,” Altair countered. He tipped his head back so his neck was arched and his lips were drawn into a smile turned upside down. “Chaos exists, and violence is proof of _that_.”

They were stupid boys, wrestling to make their point.

\--

Malik believed his Mother (of course he had) but he asked for proof regardless. Her voice was broken glass, rolling over on itself, she said, “I won’t let you see him like that. I won’t let you remember him that way.”

\--

The red demon in his nightmare was a blood puddle on the floor. The aggravated catch of breath in his lungs going up-down like a wet whistle sucking at the wound between his ribs. The world was full of black spots.

Altair was half-an-arm away, looking at him with both eyes open. His face was distorted in the darkness, pulled out of shape by the struggle to breath. His hands were red-and-sticky when they reached across the distance, the loose grip of his hand an anchor in the ugly black undertow. “Malik,” he said (the way he always did), “hold on Malik. Hold on.”

They were lovers, lying in blood, holding hand against the inevitable tide. Malik was _tired_ and _heavy_ , sucking in bloody air through his ragged cheek. He thought he said (I love you) but there was no sound to the words, only the same wet-whistle of noise and the involuntary gasping for breath. 

\--

The hospital gave him psychiatrist that used slow, long words.

They gave him chaplains with promises of God’s great mercy.

They gave him medicines that invaded his veins.

They gave him a tube that ran from his nose to his gut and the poured him full of essential nutrients while the patchwork of wounds across his skin healed to glossy-white-scars brazenly visible proof he’d survived.

The hospital gave him every unwanted gift; each of them turned down but still forced on him.

\--

Altair liked to smother him in bed, liked to roll on top of him in the early morning. He was piggish about it, using the slight advantage of his height and the benefit of two arms to hold Malik in place as he mumbled sweet-hurried nothings into his ear.

“I hate you most in the morning,” Malik mumbled at him.

Altair left ugly, wet kisses across his neck and cheek in the morning, giggling at his own imperfect wit. “You hate everything most in the morning.”

“Nothing more than you,” Malik told him. But he wiggled and rolled until he was on his back and Altair’s annoying kisses fell on his lips instead of his neck. “Why do you always wake me up?”

Altair’s voice was so low in the morning, full of last night’s half-finished dreams. He said, “I miss you most in the morning.” And he kissed him like he _meant it_ and everything Malik knew about the horror of Altair’s childhood was half-realized truths. Every time Altair touched him in the morning he was a raw wound, and every time he woke him up there was desperation in his humor and every time Malik woke up smothered in bed he was just _angry_.

\--

Kadar must have been the cavalry. He was simply there, between the medicine that put Malik to sleep and the one that woke him up. Sitting as still as a ghost in the cramped space between the bed and the window. His hair was a mop of curls, his eyes intently watching the morning-reruns as his fingers ran absently over the raised buttons of the remote. 

They sat in silence; each aware of the futility of this last effort.

\--

In his nightmares, Malik remembered closing his eyes. He remembered the thick smell of copper and the intolerable pain in his quivering body. 

He remembered Altair’s fingers tightening around his hand and the thought that followed him into the dark ( _we die together_ ). It came to him like peace, at last.


End file.
